Van Troubles

So... Irene had her first driving lesson and it did not go very well...

Let me start by saying that nobody got hurt, not even a scratch, thank God.

I was in the kitchen cooking dinner while the kids were outside playing. I could hear them hooting and hollering as they rode their bikes and scooters in the driveway. Next thing I hear is Emma come into the house and say, "Irene drove the car down to the street." She said it in such a nonchalant way that it took me a minute to process. "What?!" I asked. Emma just said it again. I went to the door and sure enough, the van wasn't where I'd left it.  I patted my pockets and my keys were there, so I knew it wasn't that I'd left them in it or something like that. Panic set in and I bolted out the door. No van in the driveway. No van down at the street. I freaked out and started running. I had the presence of mind to count the kids on my way down and they were all there... except for Irene.

Apparently what happened is that while they were playing in the driveway, Irene had climbed into the van on her own and leaned hard enough on the gear shift to knock it out of Park. From there, it rolled backward down our driveway and shot across the street into the park and down into the cedar trees. Irene was completely fine, except for being scared out of her mind. I can only imagine the image of the van flying down the driveway, bouncing across the street and then cruising its way through the park backwards with Irene at the wheel. 

It could have been so much worse. On the way down, the van squashed our two tricycles that were in the driveway behind it. Thank God everyone was out of the way and unhurt.

 The van, however...

 was not in such good shape.

 Like, really bad shape.

As in... Totaled. It's toast. We no longer have a van.

It turns out that there was a recall about 4 years ago on our van for exactly this problem. According to Toyota, they have a record of sending a notice to our address, but we never got it. Fortunately, our insurance is fantastic. We have GEICO (yes, it's supposed to be all caps. It's an acronym. I'm not shouting it) and they said they needed to work up a valuation on it so they could figure out how much to pay us for it. I was determined not to get raked over the coals and did my own research. I determined that it was worth around $7100-7200. After waiting a week, they finally got back to me and offered us... $6950. I have to say, I was surprised. I wasn't going to quibble over such a small difference between our values. It was impressive not to get jerked around.

Our plan now is to use the Suburban for our family car and look into replacing Rebecca's aging Mazda in the near future with something that's not falling apart and has working air conditioning!